Automated SAP EDI testing for S/4HANA conversion projects

S/4HANA conversion projects are taking off with more and more companies moving to the latest version of the the famous SAP ERP system. On one hand this is a huge opportunity to start using the latest features but on the other hand it can be a challenge are the conversion process may require code or process changes. With S/4HANA Selective Data Transition projects companies are implementing more complex projects (new business functions, systems consolidations for merging many individual systems into a larger single instance or even doing carvouts where one system is split into a few simpler systems). The question is how can we make sure that the SAP EDI scenarios are working in the same way after the conversion as they did before the conversion?

HANA DB refresh/copy using Point in Time Recovery option

Background :- Basically, when we want to Copy a Production DB to QA DB, we are mostly left with the option to recover QA DB with a Complete Data Backup of the Prod DB which might be a few days older. But if we want to recover to recent point in time, we need to trigger a Complete Backup, copy the backup file to QA host and then Recover that, and this is more time consuming. Lets take an analogy of the same scenario with MS SQL Server, where we can restore the complete backup of the source DB in the target with No Recovery option a day prior to migration or refresh, and at the time of migration/refresh, we can take a diff backup and recover the target DB, which brings the data to most recent point in time without spending too much time. This option does not work in HANA as we need Backup Catalog to be available if we want to recover HANA DB with Complete Backup and Diff Backup. In this blog, I am suggesting a solution for this case.

HANA SQL Processing and Generating Optimum Plan

Need for Query optimization:

Globally lot of customers using SAP HANA for quite some time now. On one side they are enjoying benefits of in-memory capabilities but on other side there is exponential growth in data. Also, with more and more user adoption for self-service reporting, there is high chance that some of the best practices are not followed. This generates need for optimization of SQL queries getting triggered on HANA. If you do not have SQL query in proper manner it may not work in optimal way with this exponentially growing data. Sometimes some reporting tools generating SQL query in background which is not visible to business users and they will not have idea about the exact query.

Principal propagation setup with SAP S/4HANA on-premise system and SAP Cloud Platform

Principal propagation gives the ability to forward the user context of the message unchanged from the sender to the receiver.

In this blog post, lets discuss on how to implement SSO with principal propagation in a way that it trusts the requests coming via the cloud connector configured.

There are two levels of trust that needs to be configured. First, the Cloud Connector needs to identify itself with the system certificates for the HTTPS. Second, we need to allow this identity to propagate accordingly, so that a short lived X.509 certificate could be forwarded.

Finally, we map the user in the target system – the SAP S/4HANA on-premise system, in this case.

HCL Workload Automation and SAP best performance together

When we need operational efficiency and orchestration in an IT and Business workflows, Workload Automation is the best approach for Enterprise Resource Planning.

We see day by day our customers, especially those using SAP to run their critical jobs with specific time constraints and committed deadline.

Business jobs must run and must take less time as possible using at the best all available resources on the target server.

By leveraging the power of HCL Workload Automation and making the most out of its integration with SAP, we have seen our customers move their businesses to the next level of innovation and maturity.

Real-time reporting solution combining Geo-spatial and Financial data

In this blog post, I describe the steps I followed to create a real-time reporting solution combining Geo spatial and Financial data. The data is federated from SAP S/4HANA®  Flexible Real Estate Management (RE-FX), SAP Geographical Enablement Framework (SAP Geo Framework) and consumed using Esri ArcGIS (Pro or Insights).

This was an iterative process between the Data provisioning and Data consumption.

Components

◉ SAP S/4HANA Flexible Real Estate Management

◉ SAP Geographical Enablement Framework

◉ Esri ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Insights

SAP HANA Cloud modeling in Business Application Studio

SAP Business Application Studio is a new SAP Cloud Platform service available on CF environment, it has got a modern development environment to create business applications. It is available as a Cloud service and positioned as a successor to WebIDE fullstack. In the past, It has got features to support fiori and Cloud Application programming models but not the native HANA modeling models like Calculation views and HANA DB Explorer for runtime access. With that it used to be a combination of Web IDE full stack for Native HANA models(CVs) and BAS for other application developments. In the latest update to BAS, HANA modeling tools are made available to use.

SAP S/4HANA Data Management

This blog post targets SAP Solution Architects and Technical Architects who are planning or moved their SAP ERP system to SAP S/4HANA

Motivation

Data is the foundation for any business, well managed data is critical for any business process. Data Management Strategy is an essential activity to maintain a good system performance and to optimize the total cost of your system operations, data management is relevant for all SAP applications that generate large amounts of data.

How to load customers (business partners) with SAP S/4HANA data migration cockpit

Purpose

This blog explains the different approach for the load of customers, suppliers (vendors), contact persons in S/4HANA, that makes the use of business partners for these objects mandatory and old transactions like XD01, XK01, … have been deprecated and are no longer available. I will explain how the data migration cockpit can be used for customer load and what is the logic to fill the file template for customers with its different sheets (general data, sales view, finance view, contact persons,…).

How customers were loaded with ECC 6.0

With SAP ECC6.0 and previous versions it was common to create LSMW objects linked to different recordings created ad-hoc with transactions XD01 or VD01 or use program RFBIDEK0. File structure had to be defined within LSMW.

COPD study, explanation and interpretability with Python machine learning client for SAP HANA

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a type of obstructive lung disease. Globally, it is estimated that 3.17 million deaths were caused by this disease in 2015. Exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution, tabacco smoke (especially secondhand smoke), dusts and fumes is the key facts. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce two new features of Python machine learning client for SAP HANA: dataset report and model report to support me to study COPD cases. These two features provide great convenience to data scientists to analyze their data and the trained model. Let’s go through a use case to learn how it works.

S/4HANA – Extensibility Inventory fiori App

Overview of Extensibility Inventory

We can use this app to display an overview of your extensibility items and to view associations or dependencies between various extensibility items.

The Standard view in this app displays all existing extensibility items. To easily locate a given extensibility item, you can enter its name in the search box.

By clicking on an extensibility item, you can view information about it. The following information is provided:

SAP HANA Query Analysis and Optimization – using SQL Trace

I will discuss about the inbound SAP HANA Query Analysis and Optimization using SQL Trace.

There are three main analysis process by which we used to analysis HANA query and optimize it.

1. SQL Trace

2. Explain Plan

3. Visualized plan(PlanViz).

Today I will discuss about the analysis and Optimization of SAP HANA Query using SQL Trace. Before we use SQL trace the we need to use which scenario we will use SQL trace .For the below situation we will use SQL trace –

SAP HANA 2.0 High Availability Step By Step process

Introduction

This blog post walk’s you through the step by step process for SAP HANA 2.0 high availability setup.  How to add a stand by host.

A distributed HANA(scale out) setup need 2 servers (one worker, another  standby).

Note: Both Host1 and Host2  server’s date and time should be same.

Securing SAP HANA: 6 Best Practices

Protecting the sensitive information stored in your SAP HANA workloads is critical to maintain compliance and business continuity. However, as cyber security threats evolve in a rapid pace, keeping systems secure becomes increasingly challenging. 

Non Parameterized Query Processing in SAP HANA

In this blog I will discuss about the query processing steps inside SAP HANA  i.e. how the SAP HANA  process a query in a optimize way and what are SAP HANA component associate with the processing.

The main objective is to discuss about the techniques we will use to optimize query performance in a better way when business critical HANA query or HANA information view got stuck or taking to much time to execute. But that I will discuss one by one on the next blogs… to do that we need to know basic query processing architecture of HANA and steps in details which I will discuss in this blog.

Track ISS with SAP Data Intelligence and SAP HANA: Ingest and transform data

The purpose of this post is purely educational. Using SAP Data Intelligence and SAP HANA for what we will achieve is the overkill. But learning how to build data pipelines while having fun and learning something about space (what we geeks all love) should be reasonable.

Introducing the SAP HANA Cloud Management Tool

Overview

The SAP HANA Cloud management tool (HCMT) is a new addition to the database administration (DBA) tooling in SAP HANA Cloud services. Users already using the SAP HANA cockpit DBA tool will find the HCMT to be similar to the Database Directory application. The HCMT is invoked via a new option along with the SAP HANA cockpit and the SAP HANA Database Explorer (DBX) on the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit instances page for SAP HANA Cloud.

The aim of the SAP HANA Cloud management tool is to provide DBAs with a simple and centralized overview of their SAP HANA Cloud database and data lake instances. You can also perform management tasks such as creating new instances, checking their status, reviewing any notifications and alerts that might have been raised, examining memory and storage consumption, and start//stop/edit/delete your instances.

External HANA view configuration in BW on HANA

1. Overview

SAP Introduced new functionality after BW 7.4 on HANA where we can generate HANA view directly from BW application during BW object activation, The external HANA view enables to create scenarios where data, which is modeled in the BW system, are merged with data modeled in SAP HANA with SAP HANA tools.

This document will provide you an overview of external HANA view configuration from the SAP BASIS point of view.